Are we happy with the impact factor?

Which journal should I choose for the publication of my research? Which indicators of quality are important? How do I best reach a wide and international audience? Which journal within my field has most impact or the highest Impact Factor? In the end, what I'm looking for is a high-quality venue that at the same time allows my paper to be read, used, and cited by as many readers as possible. Although many researchers see the publication of their works in Open Access journals as the most efficient way to increase impact simply because they are freely accessible, many academics are at the same time expected, and sometimes even required, to publish in journals that are covered by Web of Science (WoS) and have an impact factor. Thus, when speaking about a journal's impact, most often we mean the impact factor as it is calculated by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI, Thomson Reuters). It refers to the frequency with which a journal's articles are cited in other scientific publications with an impact factor over a period of time. However, the impact factor is now perceived as more than just a measure of citations; it has become a metric used to evaluate the researcher himself/herself and even academic institutions. Often, other types of clinical, societal, or other impacts are ignored in this context, which has been heavily criticized over the years (e.g. Williams, 2007). In December 2013, the European Journal of Psycho-traumatology (EJPT) was accepted in WoS, and the first impact factor (for 2013) was expected in June 2014. Belonging to the 10% of journals accepted into WoS, EJPT had proved that it had high ''scientific quality.'' However, when the Journal Citations Report came out this summer, EJPT was missing. After inquiry at Thomson Reuters, we were told that the volume of EJPT papers was very high and that they had not managed to create the citation reports in time. In March 2014, Thomson Reuters should have indexed all papers published in EJPT from the start of the journal in 2010 through 2013, but they were not and therefore EJPT will have to wait until June 2015 to get its first official impact factor. Luckily the impact factor is quite easy to calculate. In any given year, it is calculated by counting all citations during one year to a journal's content published in the preceding 2 years, divided by the …